As the number of people communicating over a publicly accessible communication network, such as the Internet, continues to grow, the use, availability and distribution of media content via the Internet, such as video and audio media files, grows as well. The popularity of delivering and experiencing media content via the Internet continues to grow because the Internet provides for both immediacy of the media and interactivity of the media. Media content can provide a rich interactive user experience from a network connected device. In addition, media content delivered to computing devices via a network may receive input from the user or information about the user to both personalize and dynamically enhance the user experience, thereby further increasing the immediacy and interactivity of the medium.
As such, delivering media content via the Internet is quickly gaining adoption as a mechanism for reaching consumers for purposes of marketing and monetizing media content or media assets. For example, traditional broadcasting services, such as television and television advertising, are interested in transforming broadcasting content, advertisement and other media assets into Internet delivered content and Internet enabled consumer experiences that can be monetized, controlled and managed. However, even with increasing improvements in consumer devices, broadband technologies and multimedia interfaces, the adoption and movement towards Internet or Internet Protocol (IP) based delivery of media content to consumer devices raises various challenges in development, implementation and deployment, including content ingestion, media encoding and transcoding, content and catalog management, publishing and delivery, device targeting, digital rights management, and reporting.
One of the challenges facing the development of IP-based media delivery is that consumers may want to experience high quality media content or rich interactive media, such as high-definition video. The delivery and performance of high quality media content may be limited or constrained when transmitted over a network, such as the Internet. For example, a client may communicate with a content provider via a web browser. The content provider may provide a desired user experience via a web-site, such as by branding and interactive content. A smaller video media file of a lower quality may be streamed by the content provider via the Internet to the client and displayed in the web browser with minimal or no performance issues. However, a larger media file of higher quality may only be streamed to the client in a manner having performance issues such as delays in transmission, or other processing delays. As such, the user may be prevented from viewing the media in a continuous desired fashion. This may be due to the size of the media or the bandwidth of the connection of the device. For example, the client may be connected to the Internet with a slower network connection.
In some cases, the user could download the media file to the client and then start a media player locally to view the media offline. Although after downloading the file, the user may experience the higher quality media, the client is then using another user interface, such as a media player, to play the media offline. This results in a different user experience than that provided by the online web-site presence of the content provider. Content providers may invest thousands to millions of dollars in designing web-sites and rich interactive content to present a brand, attract new customers, and maintain customer loyalty. Therefore, content providers typically do not desire users to experience this designed content differently. Therefore, systems and methods are desired for downloading offline content to a user that provides a similar user experience as the online content of the content provider.